Freer Gallery of Art

Located on the National Mall, the Freer Gallery of Art is the Smithsonian's oldest art museum, gifted by railroad magnate Charles Lang Freer and opened in 1923. Freer spent decades assembling East Asian ceramics, Japanese screens, Chinese bronzes and works by American aesthetes like James McNeill Whistler. His deed forbids the museum from ever lending or buying additions – the collection must stay as he left it. The most famous room is the Peacock Room, a dining hall Whistler painted in London in 1877 that Freer had dismantled and shipped to Washington. Today the galleries offer a contemplative counterpoint to the louder Mall: granite columns, dimmed light, intimate cases of Song Dynasty bowls and Thai Buddhas. A quiet refuge if you need a break from the crowds.